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Morning Brew proved that email newsletters weren't dead – 2.5 million subscribers, 40% open rates, and $20M in revenue by 2020 – by redesigning business news for readers who had grown up on social.
ENTRY ANGLES
Launch or migrate existing content properties into newsletter format in non-US markets · Build alternative platform layer to Substack for newsletter distribution · Identify and fill gaps in existing newsletter platform offerings
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Audience acquisition and growth at scale, Ad sales and monetization, Newsletter platform infrastructure
Email newsletters were supposed to be dead. Morning Brew proved they weren't – and built a $75M media business on that premise.
The flagship Morning Brew newsletter has 2.5 million subscribers, and the broader portfolio – three additional newsletters, a podcast, and a merchandise store – brings the total subscriber count to 3 million. A classic 80/20 split: the core product drives nearly everything. Open rates hold at 40%, which is roughly double the industry average for email.
The business is ad-supported and free to subscribers. By 2020, the company was projecting $20M in revenue on $6M in profit, with a 60-person team. The trajectory from founding to acquisition is worth noting: two college students launched a side project in 2015, raised $750K in 2017 to turn it into a business (100K subscribers at the time), reached operational breakeven in 2018 at $3M revenue with 900K subscribers, hit $13M revenue and $3M profit in 2019 at 1.5M subscribers. Business Insider acquired Morning Brew in October 2020 at a $75M valuation, with founders retaining a minority stake.
Email consistently outperforms every other channel at converting readers into buyers – which is what makes newsletter advertising work and why Morning Brew has been able to retain advertisers and keep adding new ones. That's the structural advantage underlying the whole business.
For years, the conventional wisdom was that email was dying, and creators poured attention into blogs, YouTube channels, and Instagram accounts. Then email had a second act – not as transactional infrastructure, but as a media format in its own right.
The newsletter renaissance spawned a range of complementary businesses. The Hustle built a 1M-subscriber free list funded by advertising, then layered in a paid Trends subscription at $299/year. Substack raised $17.4M to build subscription infrastructure for individual writers. The template was established: newsletters can be standalone media businesses, not just marketing appendages.
Email newsletters remain underdeveloped outside the US market. Given that American media trends typically arrive elsewhere with a multi-year lag, the newsletter boom may still be in its early stages in many markets.
There are two directions to move. The first is to launch or migrate an existing content property into newsletter format. The second is to look at the platform layer – Substack and its alternatives – and identify what's missing or worth cloning.
If you're going the content route, Morning Brew's numbers are instructive about what it actually takes. In their first funded year, they grew from 100K to nearly 1M subscribers with strong open rates – and spent several million dollars to do it. In 2019, $10M of their $13M revenue went back into costs: roughly $4–5M on team and operations, and $5–6M on subscriber acquisition, representing 40–50% of revenue. The lesson isn't that newsletters don't work – it's that the skills that matter most are audience acquisition and ad sales, not writing ability. The writing gets you started; the distribution keeps you growing.